Automation and integrations decision
Apify
Prefer self-hosting the available open-source crawler libraries and deploy a lightweight runner — it's realistic for a single capable engineer to replace Apify's core scraping and storage workflow, but you lose the marketplace, managed proxies, and compliance/SLA guarantees.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Apify alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Run a crawler (Actor) on a target URL, extract structured data, store results, schedule or trigger runs, and fetch results via an API.
What it still won’t have
- Large marketplace of pre-built Actors and rented Actor listings
- Managed auto-scaling infrastructure for concurrent runs
- Built-in proxy network and integrated proxy pricing
- Billing, marketplace payouts, and storefront distribution
- Enterprise compliance attestation and SLAs
What remains hard
- Marketplace liquidity
Apify: The largest marketplace of trusted tools for AI
- Infrastructure at scale
Actors scale automatically as you gain new users. You don’t need to worry about compute, storage, proxies, or authentication.
- Compliance and regulation
99.95% uptime. SOC2, GDPR, and CCPA compliant.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a self-hosted web crawling service using Node.js + Playwright, a small API server (Express), Postgres for metadata, and S3-compatible storage for payloads. Implement: (1) a Puppeteer/Playwright-based crawler that accepts a start URL and a domain-limited enqueue policy; (2) HTML-to-JSON extraction pipeline that outputs cleaned text and media links; (3) persistent job queue and scheduler with concurrency controls and retries; (4) proxy rotation support (configurable list) and basic anti-blocking headers; (5) REST API endpoints to start a job, check status, and download results (JSON/CSV); (6) simple web UI to submit URLs and view runs. Out of scope: multi-tenant billing, marketplace storefront, advanced anti-blocking networks, and enterprise compliance certification. Include error handling, retry/backoff, logging, and unit/integration tests.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Self-host verdict base92
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 1/1 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-9
- Evidence score98
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productApify — official product
- official pricingApify pricing
- official docsApify: Data for generative AI
- open sourcegetmaxun/maxun
- open sourcefirecrawl/firecrawl
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
